March 25, 2009
The grand discussion on the future of journalism
The past few weeks have seen a huge outburst of commentary about the perilous states of the newspaper business in particular and journalism in general. Having been a little busy, I haven’t found the time to chime in seriously. That said, my views include:
- People are increasingly unwilling to pay money for news or commentary.
- People are increasingly resistant to conventional advertising.
- Therefore, traditional journalistic business models are indeed fried, both in their original media and online.
- However, lots of people are willing to provide some of the functions of traditional news media — whether news, commentary, or both — with very different economics. For example, my blogs are a classic “freemium” operation: I don’t get paid for writing them, pittances from Network World and Intelligent Enterprise excepted. However, they drive a huge fraction of both the credibility and leads for my real businesses.
- To the extent there ever was one, the wall between news and commentary is crumbling. This is true in print, broadcast, and online media alike, and indeed was happening before the internet became a big part of most people’s lives.
- But the blurring of news and commentary can be and is overdone. E.g., press releases get mixed into news headline feeds all the time, and that isn’t necessary.
- The old graph, in which events passed from fact to reporting to mass dissemination, in a fairly linear and simple manner, is becoming much more complex. Not coincidentally, the technology to handle that complexity is evolving rapidly.
Highlights of the recent discussion include (but in no way are limited to):
- Clay Shirky asserted that it is time to think the unthinkable about the collapse of the newspaper industry.
- Zachary Seward argued that most of the questions and challenges had been figured out already in the mid-1990s, but answers have been sadly lacking since. I participated in discussions of that kind then too, and I agree with him. ( Indeed, a number of those were in my own living room, with two-term Author’s Guild board member Linda Barlow.)
- Micah Sifry proposed three areas of technical advance that he thinks would help advance “pro/am” collaborative news — better collaboration tools (sure), better web text mining (I suspect he’s conflating several distinct things in that one), and better data visualization (I’m so non-visual that I have little opinion on that one).
- Alex Payne suggested that technology journalism isn’t very good, and proposed some fixes. Frankly, I think his focus is in the wrong place, but maybe I’m misreading him.
- Nature Magazine discoursed on the changes in how scientific information gets to the public. Nature also offered suggestions for changing science journalism that aren’t much different than what Payne proposes in technology.
- Eric Clemons wrote a post for TechCrunch arguing that internet advertising in its present form(s) is doomed to failure. Fierce controversy ensued. For example, Danny Sullivan was infuriated by Clemons’ assertion that pay-per-click search advertising is in some way inherently dishonest.
- Expanding on Clemons’ theme, Doc Searls mixed I-told-you-so with a proposal for micropayments.
- TechCrunch honcho Michael Arrington wrote about the tangles of real and perceived bias.
- Henry Blodget offered a pithy take on the numbers.
- Dan Conover offered a huge number of ideas about the future of the news business.
- A couple of months ago, Jason Calcanis highlighted some dangers of the low-privacy Internet era. I think that’s relevant to this discussion, because if the future of news and commentary is that lots of people provide it, and their biases are balanced or held in check by a general Internet community, incivility can be a serious obstacle.
- And finally, here is a collection of political cartoons about the real or supposed death of newspapers, some quite poignant or funny.
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